Portia and Marcia: Female political identity and the historical imagination, 1770-1800

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 62, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 265-294

  Hicks, Philip ^a  

^a SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949941298     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491602     Document Type: Review

References (192)

1. see also James McLachlan, "Classical Names, American Identities: Some Notes on College Students and the Classical Traditions in the 1770s," in Classical Traditions in Early America, ed. John W. Eadie (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1976), 82-83
2. On the bulwark of patriarchalism, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 5, 25, 48-51, 109-10, 305
3. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 114
4. Ruth H. Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650-1800 (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), 44, 46, 59, 140-42, 157
5. Eran Shalev, "Ancient Masks, American Fathers: Classical Pseudonyms during the American Revolution and Early Republic," Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 151-72
6. For Adams and republicanism, see Elaine Forman Crane, "Political Dialogue and the Spring of Abigail's Discontent," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56, no. 4 (October 1999): 745, 768-69
7. Scholars have called attention to the subject of the Roman matrons but have not pursued it at the length developed here; see Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), 5
8. Fredrika J. Teute, "Roman Matron on the Banks of Tiber Creek: Margaret Bayard Smith and the Politicization of Spheres in the Nation's Capital," in A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic, ed. Donald R. Kennon (Charlottesville, Va., 1999), 92
9. For women's political roles, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston, 1980), 156-93, 243-50, 297
10. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), chap. 2
11. Alfred F. Young, "The Women of Boston: 'Persons of Consequence' in the Making of the American Revolution, 1765-76," in Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), 181-226
12. Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2001), 7, 10-12, 79, 83, 144, chap. 2
13. On the liberal-republican fusion, see Kerber, "The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment - An American Perspective," "The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation," in Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 41-62, 147-48, 153-54
14. "American republicanism offered women a role as wives. It was left to liberalism, as Kerber suggests, to extol the political dimensions of motherhood" (Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," WMQ 44, no. 4 [October 1987], 690 n. 2)
15. For Wollstonecraft, see Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody Kramnick (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1982)
16. Rosemarie Zagarri, "The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America," WMQ 55, no. 2 (April 1998): 203-30
17. For challenges to the masculine character of republicanism, see Ruth H. Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815," "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," in Bloch, Gender and Morality, 4-5, 7-9, 13, 155-59, chaps. 3, 7
18. Rosemarie Zagarri, "Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother," American Quarterly 44, no. 2 (June 1992): 192-215
19. As Linda Kerber has observed, "nearly every [eighteenth-century] writer" describing "the model republican woman" used lists of historical precedents as justification. Kerber lays special emphasis on the Spartan mother as a prototype; see Kerber, "Republican Mother," "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805," in Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women, 28, 43
20. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 104-6, 110 (quotation, 206)
21. Patricia Jewell McAlexander, "The Creation of the American Eve: The Cultural Dialogue on the Nature and Role of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century America," Early American Literature 9, no. 3 (Winter 1975): 257
22. Nina Baym, "Women and the Republic: Emma Willard's Rhetoric of History," American Quarterly 43, no. 1 (March 1991): 2
23. For women as writers of history, see Baym, American Women Writers, esp. 5, 31-32
24. Baym, "Between Enlightenment and Victorian: Toward a Narrative of American Women Writers Writing History," Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 22-41
25. Sharon M. Harris, ed., American Women Writers to 1800 (Oxford, 1996), 349-71
26. Baym, American Women Writers, 215-22
27. Mary Kelley, "Designing a Past for the Present: Women Writing Women's History in Nineteenth-Century America," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 105, pt. 2 (1996): 325, 328-29
28. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 258, 259
29. On exemplar historiography, see George H. Nadel, "Philosophy of History before Historicism," in Studies in the Philosophy of History: Selected Essays from History and Theory, ed. Nadel (New York, 1965), 49-73
30. H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (1965; repr., Indianapolis, Ind., 1998), 5-6, 10-11
31. Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002), 18-19
32. J. G. A. Pocock, comment, in Eadie, Classical Traditions in Early America, 258
33. Before launching into her compilation of female worthies, Judith Sargent Murray explained that to overcome male prejudice against women, "we produce, instead of arguments, a number of well attested facts, which the student of female annals hath carefully compiled. ... it is notorious that a number of well attested facts have abundantly more weight with the multitude, than the finest spun systems which ever issued from the archives of theory" ([Judith Sargent Murray], The Gleaner: A Miscellaneous Production in Three Volumes by Constantia [Boston, 1798], 3: 191-92, 197)
34. For classical political institutions as models, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969; repr., Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 606-15
35. Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992)
36. Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), chap. 7
37. On the immutability of human nature, see Douglass Adair, "'Experience Must Be Our Only Guide': History, Democratic Theory, and the United States Constitution," in Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York, 1974), 108-11
38. Murray, Gleaner, 2: 108
39. For women's use of contemporary and historical models to "self-fashion" themselves as learned women, see Mary Kelley, "Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (September 1996): 401-24
40. For sources of theatricality, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), 2, 162
41. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), 2-3
42. Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), 18-21, 116-18
43. On historical role-playing in the eighteenth century, see Judith A. Vega, "Feminist Republicanism and the Political Perception of Gender," in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, vol. 2, The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), 161-62
44. Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," WMQ 39, no. 3 (July 1982): 422-27
45. James H. Johnson, "Versailles, Meet Les Halles: Masks, Carnival, and the French Revolution," Representations, no. 73 (Winter 2001): 89-116
46. Joseph M. Levine, "Why Neoclassicism? Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 25, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 75-93
47. Philip Hicks, "Bolingbroke, Clarendon, and the Role of Classical Historian," Eighteenth-Century Studies 20, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 445-71
48. For neoclassic play acting, see Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, N.Y., 1984), 13, 20, 162, 249
49. Richard, Founders and the Classics, chap. 3
50. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1989), chaps. 5-6
51. For heroic models, see McLachlan, "Classical Names, American Identities," 87-93
52. Peter Karsten, Patriot-Heroes in England and America: Political Symbolism and Changing Values over Three Centuries (Madison, Wis., 1978), 43-51
53. For Cato, see Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, in The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addision, ed. Henry G. Bohn (London, 1877), 1: 162-226
54. Fredric M. Litto, "Addison's Cato in the Colonies," WMQ 23, no. 3 (July 1966): 431-49
55. Jack P. Greene, "Character, Persona, and Authority: A Study of Alternative Styles of Political Leadership in Revolutionary Virginia," in The Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict, and Leadership, ed. W. Robert Higgins (Durham, N.C., 1979), 15-19, 32-37
56. Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, 28-29
57. For traditional historiography, see Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (London, 1996), 173-74, 215, chap. 1
58. For allusions to the tradition of female "unworthies" see, for example, [Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison], The Federalist, ed. Edward Mead Earle (New York, [1937]), 28-29
59. For the tradition of female worthies, see Plutarch, Mulierum Virtutes, in Plutarch's Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (London, 1931), 3: 473-581
60. Giovanni Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guido A. Guarino (New Brunswick, N.J., 1963)
61. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York, 1982)
62. Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault, eds. and trans., A Renaissance Woman: Helisenne's Personal and Invective Letters (Syracuse, N.Y., 1986), 95-100
63. Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr., eds., Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy (Binghamton, N.Y., 1983), 82-83, 113, 126-27
64. Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), 65-109
65. For the British tradition, see D. R. Woolf, "A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500-1800," American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 655 n. 41
66. Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago, 2000), chap. 2
67. For American editions of British texts, see "A Friend of the Sex" [John Adams], Sketches of the History, Genius, Disposition, Accomplishments, Employments, Customs and Importance of the Fair Sex (Philadelphia, 1796)
68. [Antoine Léonard Thomas and William Russell], Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women (Philadelphia, 1774)
69. William Alexander, The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time (Philadelphia, 1796)
70. Murray, Gleaner, 2: 135-76, 284-88, 3: 191-223 (quotation, 198), 262-64, 308-9
71. On Murray's project generally, see Sheila L. Skemp, Judith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston, 1998), 108-11
72. Sharon M. Harris, ed., Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray (Oxford, 1995), xxvi-xxix, xxxiv
73. For invocations of the worthies by Anne Bradstreet as early as 1643, see John C. Shields, The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self (Knoxville, Tenn., 2001), 21-22
74. For Warren, see Lester H. Cohen, "Explaining the Revolution: Ideology and Ethics in Mercy Otis Warren's Historical Theory," WMQ 37, no. 2 (April 1980): 204-5, 210, 213
75. On male political behavior, see Richard, Founders and the Classics, esp. 83-84, 118
76. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 6-10, 48-53
77. Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, 226, 233-36
78. "Clarissa a Lady of This City," "Vision of the Paradise of Female Patriotism," United States Magazine [1] (March 1779): 122-24
79. see also Skemp, Judith Sargent Murray, 38
80. For Murray's interest in fame as it related to the female worthies, see Murray, "On the Equality of the Sexes," Massachusetts Magazine [2] (March 1790): 134
81. Murray, Gleaner, 3: 196, 205, 217-18
82. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 178-88
83. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 99, 103-4, 112-13
84. Livy, Ab urbe condita (The history of Rome from its foundation), 5.50, in The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1971), 396-97
85. For gendered modes of political communication, see Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, 246-47
86. For examples of female worthies adopted as pen names, see American Museum 6 (July-December 1789): 147-49
87. Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 17, 249
88. Young, "Women of Boston," 209, 226
89. For male pseudonyms, see Shalev, Journal of the Early Republic 23: 151-72
90. On achieving worthy status, see, for example, J. A. Neale, "An Essay on the Genius and Education of the Fair Sex," Philadelphia Minerva, Mar. 14, 1795
91. Young, "Women of Boston," 218
92. For scholars' treatment of the pen names, see, for example, Rosemary Keller, Patriotism and the Female Sex: Abigail Adams and the American Revolution (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1994), 150
93. Jean Fritz, Cast for a Revolution: Some American Friends and Enemies, 1728-1814 (Boston, 1972), 73
94. Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, Ill., 1995), 87
95. see also Gelles, Abigail Adams: A Writing Life [New York, 2002], 47)
96. see also William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 80
97. Lynne Withey, Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams (New York, 1981), 12
98. On John Adams as a role-player, see Douglass Adair, "A Note on Certain of Hamilton's Pseudonyms," in Colbourn, Fame and the Founding Fathers, 285
99. For Macaulay, see Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols. (London, 1763-83)
100. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (New York, 1968), 358-61
101. Carla H. Hay, "Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution," Historian 56, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 301-16
102. Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992), chap. 9
103. Lucy Martin Donnelly, "The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay," WMQ 6, no. 2 (April 1949): 173-207
104. For Hortensia, see Catharine Macaulay Graham, Letters on Education. With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London, 1790)
105. Macaulay's neoclassic public image is examined by Philip Hicks, "The Roman Matron in Britain: Female Political Influence and Republican Response, ca. 1750-1800," Journal of Modern History 77, no. 1 (March 2005): 35-69
106. Natalie Zemon Davis, "History's Two Bodies," American Historical Review 93, no. 1 (February 1988): 16-18
107. Claire Gilbride Fox, "Catharine Macaulay, an Eighteenth-Century Clio," Winterthur Portfolio 4 (1968): 129-42
108. Frank H. Sommer III, "Thomas Hollis and the Arts of Dissent," in Prints in and of America to 1850, ed. John D. Morse (Charlottesville, Va., 1970), 111-59
109. L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 1: 360-61 n. 2
110. Macaulay praised seventeenth-century heroines by analogy with Roman matrons; see Philip Hicks, "Catharine Macaulay's Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain," Journal of British Studies 41, no. 2 (April 2002): 188, 191-98
111. For the historical Sophronia, see Biographium Faemineum: The Female Worthies; or, Memoirs of the Most Illustrious Ladies, of all Ages and Nations ... (London, 1766), 2: 249
112. On the genesis of Warren's literary career, see Zagarri, Woman's Dilemma, 30-34, 48-70
113. For the Cato episode, see Warren, "On Primitive Simplicity" [1779], in Poems, 232
114. Macaulay, History of England, 3: 198-990
115. For other doomsaying, see M. Warren to Catharine Macaulay, Dec. 29, 1774, ibid., fols. 5-6
116. For patriotism as an unnatural virtue in women, see [William] Russell, Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women in Different Ages (London, 1773), 2: 48-50
117. Sylvana Tomaselli, "The Most Public Sphere of All: The Family," in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger et al. (Cambridge, 2001), 250-51
118. The discourses of politeness and sensibility derived from a rich confluence of sources, including the Renaissance court, the novel, Christian ethics, various medical theories, the philosophy of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and the writings of several Scottish and French Enlightenment figures, notably Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Lord Karnes, and John Millar; see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992)
119. Sarah Knott, "Sensibility and the American War for Independence," American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 19-40
120. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 234-36, chap. 6
121. Zagarri, American Quarterly 44: 193-205
122. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Domesticating 'Virtue': Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America," in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, 1988), 160-84
123. Reflecting the rising tide of sensibility, Cato offered a modified stoicism; see Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago, 1999), 52-56, 67-69
124. Compare Macaulay: Lady Croke ("Crook") "addressed him in a style of Spartan magnanimity; conjured him not to err against his conscience and his honour for fear of incurring danger or poverty: For herself, she would be content to suffer want or any misery, rather than be the occasion of his acting against his judgment and his conscience" (Macaulay, History of England, 2: 226)
125. For Arria and Portia, see, for example, Murray, Gleaner, 3: 200, 209
126. For Abigail, see Butterfield et al., Adams Family Correspondence, 1: 288-89, 296-98
127. Keller, Patriotism and the Female Sex, 73-78
128. On this phenomenon of melding pagan and Christian value systems, see Richard, Founders and the Classics, 185, 194
129. Winterer, Culture of Classicism, 14-15
130. For the historical Portia, see Charles Rollin, The Roman History from the Foundation of Rome to the Battle of Actium ..., 3d ed. (London, 1768), 9: 351-52
131. Neale, "Essay on the Genius and Education."
132. Butterfield et al., Adams Family Correspondence, 1: 143, 358, 387
133. Compare Crane, WMQ 56: 769
134. Young, "Women of Boston," 213
135. see Butterfield et al., Adams Family Correspondence, 1: 27, 142-43, 354-55, 375-78
136. Crane, WMQ 56: 756-58
137. Zagarri, Woman's Dilemma, 90-94, 162-65
138. On creating a new self, see Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 26-28
139. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 9
140. Rollin, Roman History, 1: vii, 172-77
141. Wills, Cincinnatus, 182-88
142. On abnegation of self, see Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 61: "Ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual"
143. Butterfield et al., Adams Family Correspondence, 1: 242, 412-13
144. Rollin, Roman History, 6: 96-98
145. For Marcia the Elder, see Plutarch, "Cato the Younger," in Plutarch's Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, Mass., 1919), 8: 293-95, 327, 361-63
146. Rollin, Roman History, 9: 274
147. J[ohn] Lemprière, Lemprière's Classical Dictionary (1788, repr., London, 1984), 354
148. Marcia the Younger was presumably one of Cato the Younger's daughters from his marriage to Marcia the Elder; the mother of an older daughter, Portia, was his first wife, Atila. For Webster, see Litto, WMQ 23: 448
149. For example, another intriguing possibility is the addressee of Seneca's work on stoical consolation. This Marcia was "a model of ancient virtue" who preserved the historical writings of her father, Aulus Cremutius Cordus, persecuted for his encomium on the republican heroes Brutus and Cassius (Seneca, "To Marcia on Consolation," in Moral Essays, with an English Translation, trans. John W. Basore [London, 1932], 2: 2-97). Like Abigail Adams, Mercy Warren read a great deal of ancient history in translation, yet it is unclear which works served as the source for her pen name. She did, however, know Addison's Cato intimately
150. For her reading and education, see Lester H. Cohen, ed., foreword and editor's note to Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, by Mercy Otis Warren (Indianapolis, Ind., 1988), 1: xviii, xxxiii-xxxv
151. Zagarri, Woman's Dilemma, 12-13
152. The relationship between Abigail and Mercy, though sometimes emotionally intense, lacked the sensuality common to some female friendships using pen names in this period; see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29, esp. 4
153. For Macaulay's pioneering example, see Zagarri, Woman's Dilemma, 55, 141
154. J. G. A. Pocock, "Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian," in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge, 1998), 247
155. For Warren's recognition that women were uniquely positioned to serve the Republic as historians, see Lester H. Cohen, "Mercy Otis Warren: The Politics of Language and the Aesthetics of Self," American Quarterly 35, no. 5 (Winter 1983): 488-96
156. Baym, Critical Inquiry 18: 34
157. For the concept of social drama, see Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York, 1988), 74-76
158. see also Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock, N.Y., 1973), 19, 20, 35, 206
159. On the need to humanize classical republicanism, see Andrew Burstein, "The Political Character of Sympathy," Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 601-32
160. Vega, "Feminist Republicanism," 157, 165
161. For the ennobling function of role-playing generally, see Greene, "Character, Persona, and Authority," 5. Mercy in particular had need of an inflated self-concept. During one low point, for example, she contrasted "my little self with her faraway husband, on whom depended "the fate of empires" (Mercy Warren to James Warren, Dec. 2, 1775, Mercy Warren Papers, reel 2). Abigail had to present her views on women's rights "circumspectly, surreptitiously, and with covert humor," according to Crane, WMQ 56: 761
162. For the concept of role-playing as wish fulfillment, see Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, Calif., 1986), 73, 89
163. Adair, "Note on Certain of Hamilton's Pseudonyms," 278
164. On the limits, contradictions, and unanswered questions regarding the influential paradigm of republican motherhood, see Kerber, Women of the Republic, 12, 284-85, 287-88
165. Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women, 16-17
166. Mary Beth Norton, "The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America," American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 617-19
167. Carol R. Berkin, "'What an Alarming Crisis is This?': Early American Women and Their Histories," in The World Turned Upside-Down: The State of Eighteenth-Century American Studies at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Michael V. Kennedy and William G. Shade (Cranbury, N.J., 2001), 254-67
168. Lewis, WMQ 44: 690, 721
169. United States Magazine: A Repository of History, Politics and Literature 1 (January 1779): 19
170. For Wilson's Roman examples, see Robert Green McCloskey, ed., The Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 1: 85-89
171. By contrast, Wilson rejected the idea that the worthies Semiramis, Zenobia, and Elizabeth I proved women capable of political leadership. For the Democratic Association of Gloucester, see Rosemarie Zagarri, "Gender and the First Party System," in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (Charlottesville, Va., 1998), 126
172. "Aristides," "To the Printer of the New-Jersey Gazette, New-Jersey Gazette, [July 26, 1780], 4, no. 135
173. For Smith and her role, see Teute, "Roman Matron," 120-21
174. Allgor, Parlor Politics, chap. 5
175. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge, 1999), vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government, 257
176. On the question of women's gains in the late eighteenth century, see Joan Hoff Wilson, "The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution," in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (De Kalb, Ill., 1976), 383-445
177. Elaine F. Crane, "Dependence in the Era of Independence: The Role of Women in a Republican Society," in The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York, 1987), 253-75
178. Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, 12, 144
179. For Roman women, see Eva Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, trans. Maureen B. Fant (Baltimore, 1987), 113-22
180. Tom Hillard, "On the Stage, Behind the Cuttain: Images of Politically Active Women in the Late Roman Republic," in Stereotypes of Women in Power: Historical Perspectives and Revisionist Views, ed. Barbara Garlick, Suzanne Dixon, and Pauline Allen (New York, 1992), 38-40, 55
181. For the laws of coverture as they applied to American women, see Linda K. Kerber, "The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805," in Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women, 261-302
182. Deborah Sampson Gannett, for one, proved that a role-player may disregard social and gender boundaries. This famous female soldier of modest origins managed to co-opt a male republican persona when she struck a Cincinnatus-like pose in her one-woman show after the turn of the century; see Sandra M. Gustafson, "The Genders of Nationalism: Patriotic Violence, Patriotic Sentiment in the Performances of Deborah Sampson Gannett," in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 380-99
183. On French and British women, see Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 111, 119, 123
184. Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), 91-96
185. Vivian Penney Cameron, "Woman as Image and Image-Maker in Paris during the French Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1983), v-viii, 27, 138-50, 245-47
186. Christine Fauré, "Rights or Virtues: Women and the Republic," Vega, "Feminist Republicanism," in van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism, 2: 125-37, 164-65
187. Hicks, Journal of Modern History 77: 35-69
188. Guest, Small Change, chap. 9
189. On nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminism's debt to the tradition of female worthies, see Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 3-4, 15-17
190. Natalie Zemon Davis, "'Women's History' in Transition: The European Case," Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1976): 83-103
191. Kelley, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 105: 329-44
192. For a twenty-first century manifestation of the tradition, see, for example, Mary Lefkowitz, foreword to Encyclopedia of Women in the Ancient World, by Joyce E. Salisbury (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2001), xv, xxi